As luck would have it, the Demogorgon decides to show his creepy face at the exact same moment. Brenner and his goons show up to take Eleven back to the creepy facility that she escaped from in the first place. Mike asks Eleven to be his date to the school dance and they kiss, just as Dr. Meanwhile at the middle school, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas are helping Eleven recover after her journey to the Upside Down. They manage to briefly trap it and set it on fire, but it escapes to the Upside Down.

Together, the three of them try to fight off the Demogorgon. Just as they’re about to cut themselves with a knife to attract the monster, Nancy’s ex-boyfriend Steve Harrington shows up to apologize to Jonathan for beating him up. Nancy Wheeler and Will’s older brother Jonathan set a bunch of booby traps for the Demogorgon, hoping to catch it in our world so it can’t kill Joyce and Hopper in the Upside Down. Hopper stops by the hospital too, but as he leaves, a shady figure pulls up in a black sedan, opens up the door, and Hopper gets in. The next we see Will, he’s in the hospital being reunited with Mike, Dustin, and Lucas, who fill him in on everything that happened in his absence. (Because what do monsters love more than books, silence, and old women in glasses and buns?) Hopper performs CPR on Will and brings him back to life. They travel through the portal under Brenner’s evil lab and find Will, who is being held by the Demogorgon in the Upside Down version of the Hawkins Middle School library. Why did Hopper make such a deal? Because he wants to go to the Upside Down with Joyce Byers to save her son. (You can always spot them because they have amazing blonde hair.) Hopper tells Brenner that he’ll find Eleven at the middle school with her friends, where they built a sensory deprivation tank so she could go into the Upside Down and find Will Byers and Barb Holland. Martin Brenner, who is basically an ’80s-movie devil incarnate. In the season-one finale, Chief Jim Hopper makes a deal with Dr. Hopper and Joyce Find Will in the Upside Down

Stranger things season 1 summary